Psychocrash

May 7, 2024.

Penguin finally published Psychocrash – The Birth of Mental Environmentalism, Kono Matsu’s last ditch attempt to resuscitate the sinking general intellect.

Just like Rachel Carson’s book over half a century ago raised the specter of a Silent Spring (a world in which birds no longer sing in the springtime), Psychocrash is raising the specter of a world full of silent minds, a total spiritual wasteland — not the long-awaited New Age enlightenment, but a world where people no longer care about anything, where empathy has become stigmatized, where billions of old folks drift seamlessly into Alzheimers & dementia.

Matsu’s stunning point is that unless we kill the 24/7 grip that advertising and corpo-consumer-culture have on our minds, this human experiment of ours on planet Earth will implode in a frenzy of dog-eat-dog madness.

At this apocalyptic moment in our history, it’s time for grand gestures. And the grandest of all gestures would be to unhinge the capitalist project – to break out of the vice-like grip of the capitalist algorithm – and to create a new global operating system.